Dispatch from Valley Fire evacuation camp in Californiahttps://www.hcn.org/articles/dispatch-from-napa-county-wildfire-evacuation-camp
State officials are calling the Lake County blaze one of the fastest-moving fires in memory.Update, Sept. 15: The Valley Fire expanded to 67,000 acres, with just 15 percent containment. 585 homes were destroyed.

An impromptu village of tents and camper trailers sprang up Sunday at the Napa County Fairgrounds in the town of Calistoga as thousands fled catastrophic wildfires in Lake and Napa counties in Northern California.

State fire officials are calling the Valley Fire one of the fastest-moving fires in memory. The fire broke out at about 1:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon on Cobb Mountain, near Middletown, and rapidly ballooned out of control. It has currently scorched over 61,000 acres and is just 5 percent contained. Nearly ten thousand structures are currently threatened and a thousand or more homes are estimated to have already been lost.

[GALLERY]

Strong winds, intense drought and years of fire suppression have laid the groundwork for a blaze that was described by one firefighter as "apocalyptic" due to its speed, size and destructive force. It comes on the heels of an already-harsh fire season. A quarter million acres have burned in the state this year, a high number compared to the five-year average of 85,000 for the same interval.

Already the flames have claimed at least one life. A disabled woman died in her home on the southern side of Cobb Mountain on Saturday, according to the Lake County sheriff's office.

Residents had to get out fast. After getting dinner in Middletown on Saturday, Faith Anderson arrived home with her brother to find her neighborhood surrounded by flames. They first worked to save their neighbors' horses, before saving her own: an 8-year-old dun gelding named Dusty.

By Sunday at the Red Cross evacuation center in Calistoga, another Anderson, John Anderson, smoked a cigarette bare-chested and in cargo shorts under the trees. "It was pretty hairy. As an old boy-scout, I had us prepped for an emergency," he said. He wasn't home on Saturday, but visiting a friend in Napa, well out of harm's way. His wife and daughter evacuated on their own. "It was the one day I wasn't there. Years of preparation, whoosh! Gone!" he said. John's 8-year-old daughter Sydney was reunited with her dad at the evacuees' camp.

Sydney said the idea of not having a house anymore was scary, but she seemed to be making the best of it. It was fun playing on the grass — there is very little grass at her house — and she liked sleeping in a tent. Before she left home, she made sure to bring her favorite stuffed animal, a red teddy bear named "Fireheart" and her bow and arrow. Though Sydney’s family had their own tents, not everyone arrived with shelter. Throughout the day, volunteers set up row after row of donated tents, placing blankets and pillows inside for weary evacuees.

Nearby, in front of the center where volunteers prepared food donated by local restaurants, businesses and community members, some evacuees jammed on guitars and drums.

Gathered around a picnic table, a group of men speculated about the future. "All these people around here are my neighbors, friends, customers where I work," said George Delao, an employee at C J S Ranch Supply & Apparel in Middletown, which he had heard burned down. "I don't have a job to go to. But I have a hammer, and he has a hammer, and he does too. We can rebuild." Eager as the men were to get their lives on track, they knew it’d be several more days before they were able to return.

Camped in a tent trailer, Greg Lomakin, a resident of the town of Cobb on Cobb Mountain, was less upbeat. "It's all gone, there are no trees. There is nothing to make it pretty anymore," he said, speculating that his family would probably move on. "There's nothing even to rebuild with. You'd be living in an ash tray for a couple years at least."

]]>No publisherWildfireCommunitiesCaliforniaDroughtPeople & Places2015/09/14 16:50:00 GMT-6ArticleSocial media startup cuts food wastehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/46.1/social-media-startup-cuts-food-waste
An online exchange puts previously unwanted produce to use. Last spring, following a Sunday farmers market, Nick Papadopoulos, general manager of Bloomfield Farms in Sonoma County, Calif., surveyed his unsold produce: 40 pounds of soon-to-wilt organic broccoli. Normally, it would end up in the compost pile. Instead, he snapped a picture and posted it to the farm’s Facebook page: “We’d love to get this produce to you at a bargain price – who’s in? Text me.” Within an hour, he had a taker.

Six months later, Papadopoulos’ idea has grown into CropMobster – an online exchange for food and other resources. That’s how Jennifer Harris acquired 500 pounds of excess cabbage, which she and 15 volunteers transformed into 40 gallons of sauerkraut for Sonoma County’s Farm to Fermentation Festival. And the Twisted Horn Ranch offered to trade Longhorn beef, tractor work, a stay at its guest cabin or a donation to a local nonprofit for help planting trees along a ranch creek.

The project’s tech hub is one end of a converted turkey barn on Bloomfield Farms. As farm dogs wander around the bare wood floors, Papadopoulos and five other part-time volunteers at standing workstations update, post and tweet from their laptops about upcoming gleaning parties or newborn Araucana chicks needing a good home.

CropMobster now reaches 12 counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. About 100 farms, retailers and caterers have published alerts so far, saving roughly 110,000 pounds of produce, and generating at least $50,000 in revenue. The ultimate goal, Papadopoulos says, is to expand across the nation, and perhaps the world. What better way, he says, to reduce food waste, assist farmers and bring people closer to their food – and to their community?

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2014/01/20 09:25:00 GMT-6ArticleA map collection for time travelershttps://www.hcn.org/issues/45.2/a-map-collection-for-time-travelers
Robert Berlo’s massive map collection is an unexpected data jackpot. In 1952, rural Nebraskans encountered an extraordinary sight: an Army chaplain and his 11-year-old nephew zipping around the state in a silver Jaguar convertible. "People in Nebraska never saw such a thing as an open-topped sports car!" Robert Berlo, the nephew, told me last spring from his home in Livermore, Calif. Berlo didn't inherit his uncle's love of flash: He bought four cars in his lifetime, three of them white Toyota Camrys. But that long-ago Nebraska adventure sparked a lifelong obsession with cartography and a love of stringently organized road trips.

"We went flying through this little town called Elm Creek, and I saw a sign on the crossroad that said 'U.S. Highway 183,' " Berlo recalled. "The only time in my life that I've seen an unpaved U.S. numbered highway." It was, in fact, the last U.S. highway to be completely paved.

Berlo's uncle planned the trip using a system his nephew would later adopt. Daily itineraries detailed on index cards noted stopping and starting points, roadside attractions and town populations -- a reliable gauge for how likely a town is to have a gas station or ice cream shop. "I didn't want to miss anything," he said.

Berlo died last summer of cancer, at age 71. One of his last projects was finding a permanent home for the immense collection of maps he collected and often used on those road trips and elsewhere. He succeeded: The 13,000 items, immaculately catalogued, now reside in Stanford University's Branner Earth Sciences Library. They include every official state road map from 1929 to the present, plus U.S. Forest Service, topographic, regional and city maps.

Few think to save roadmaps; we prize only current ones. Yet Berlo amassed an unexpected data jackpot. His maps, says Jon Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, are snapshots of how America has viewed its past, present and future. On the cover of a 1973 map, for instance, Lady Liberty's lamp shines in concentric circles, clouds issue from Mississippi steamboats in lush, curling locks and Mount Rushmore's presidents are – I swear -- sporting Afros. It's a psychedelic, utopian vision of America.

Berlo's map trove is being put to good use. Stanford political scientist Clayton Nall plans to study the maps to help link the rise of suburbs to increasing political polarization. And Christensen is using them for his CityNature project, which studies how Los Angeles and San Francisco set aside parks and open space. "As the population of the planet grows," Christensen says, "we know that means expanding the built urban environment. How that happens profoundly affects how well people live -- with each other and nature. By comparing cities' (pasts) we can, I think, develop some guidelines to help shape city planning in the future." Christensen adds: "We think that in the age of Google all information lies beneath our fingertips. But historians still spend days doing archival work. These maps hold information that is not contained anywhere else."

Berlo was more than a collector; he was a dreamer. In the 1990s, he began creating imaginary maps, using the real geography of a place as the foundation for an invented city. "I began (this hobby) entranced by New Mexico's mesas," recalled Berlo. "A city on top of a mesa would be like New York or San Francisco, hemmed in by a natural boundary."

For his first project, he downloaded topographic maps of Colfax County's Johnson Mesa, and allowed himself to change one natural parameter for the nascent city –– giving New Mexico a wetter climate to make it more habitable. "Once you've made that imaginary change, then you can start working. So what happens first? Explorers come through."

He created a new map for each decade. His city might begin with an explorers' trail and a few scattered mines. In a few years, settlers might make a wagon trail and erect a few buildings. Then come the railroad, streetcars, airports, highways. To decide how his city would have fared during the Great Depression, Berlo looked to Las Cruces and Albuquerque. "Did they grow at all? Did they decline?" He named the cities and suburbs he created for local features, and added schools, hospitals, universities and public transit, based on population. "It all has to be in there, because it affects the street pattern."

After his cancer diagnosis, however, Berlo gave up imaginary map-making to focus on his family. His funeral was held in Livermore, Calif., where 200 attendees viewed a photo board showing Berlo's high school graduation and his marriage to Juanita, his wife of 43 years. There were shots of him holding his sons and grandchildren, playing pool and hiking. They were all pasted atop a California state roadmap.

]]>No publisherCommunities2013/02/15 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleResistant weeds through historyhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.20/agrichemical-companies-power-up-genetically-modified-seeds/resistant-weeds-through-history
A timeline of genetic modification from the 1950s onward.No publisherEnergy & IndustryInfographic2012/11/26 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAgrichemical companies power up genetically modified seedshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.20/agrichemical-companies-power-up-genetically-modified-seeds
The next generation of engineered seeds will escalate herbicide spraying, with potentially large environmental consequences.One sunny afternoon, Andy Nagy and Donald Shouse drove past apple trees, plum orchards and sugar beet fields to a farm north of Twin Falls, Idaho. The late August setting was one of pastoral beauty, but the two researchers concentrated on the dirt underfoot. A farmer had asked them to come investigate some problem weeds. Along irrigation ditches and amid abandoned tractors the farm manager pointed out spots where he had sprayed the powerful herbicide Roundup. Yet kochia, a weed sometimes called "poor man's alfalfa," had stubbornly failed to die.

Using shovels and buckets, Nagy and Shouse collected soil from around the plants. The dirt looked innocent enough, crumbly and crawling with earthworms. But the kochia seeds it carried could devastate Idaho's sugar beets.

At the University of Idaho, weed scientist Don Morishita will test them to see if they have evolved to be stronger than Roundup. If so, they will be the first Roundup-resistant weeds found in Idaho. Morishita won't be surprised; he has long been expecting this day, watching as herbicide-resistant kochia has spread westward across the Great Plains.

Sugar beet farmers, of course, aren't the only ones seeing Roundup-resistant weeds; corn, soy and cotton farmers have the same problems. Resistance to Roundup, also known as glyphosate, is the most common, but herbicide-resistant seeds from companies like DuPont and Calgene (now owned by Monsanto) have also encouraged resistant weeds. Now, many farmers are turning to the same companies for a new solution: seeds modified to resist multiple herbicides. Weed scientists warn, though, that any fix will prove temporary, ultimately creating more resistant weeds and escalating the weed war, as farmers spray an increasingly potent mix of weed killers, many of them far more environmentally dangerous than Roundup.

To understand why Roundup-ready sugar beets appealed to Idaho farmers, you have to know how difficult it is to control weeds in beet fields. Sugar beets are unusually sensitive to herbicides, so it was always difficult to apply weed killers without killing the crop. Beet farmers painstakingly sprayed crops by hand with chemicals that often failed. So they tilled to uproot the weeds, which worked but increased erosion. Then, a few years ago, Monsanto introduced a solution: The agricultural chemical company genetically engineered a type of sugar beet that doesn't die when sprayed with the common herbicide Roundup. With Roundup-resistant sugar beets, farmers can spray entire fields with the chemical. The beets survive but the weeds die' and suddenly, the crop is profitable to grow.

At least, it used to be. If kochia becomes resistant to Roundup, many sugar beet farmers may fail to make a living, as weeds take over their fields and crop yields dwindle. "Herbicide-resistant weeds are a concern (for all farmers) but it's the sugar beet farmers that I'm most concerned about," says Morishita, because unlike corn and soy farmers, they have few alternative herbicides.

When genetically modified, glyphosate-tolerant crops entered the market in the mid-1990s, they were hailed as a miraculous, soil-preserving, time-saving gift to America's farmers. Monsanto's "Roundup-ready" seeds rapidly became the biggest show in town; today, nearly 95 percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. are glyphosate-tolerant. This generated huge revenues: The company made yearly profits of $1 billion on Roundup alone, until its patent expired in 2000, and generic versions of the herbicide became available.

Unfortunately, over-reliance on glyphosate created textbook conditions for the development of resistant weeds. Such widespread spraying ensured weeds with Roundup resistance would survive, and their number and range increased alarmingly, across roughly 14 million acres of cropland. The center of resistance lies in the corn belt, but Roundup-resistant weeds exist in almost every state, as far west as Oregon and California, and north to Canada. The solution proposed by the big chemical companies is to develop a new round of genetically modified crops, still resistant to Roundup, but with new genes that also resist a grab bag of herbicides, a characteristic known as stacked resistance.

Once approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these seeds will allow farmers to spray additional herbicides when they encounter Roundup-tolerant weeds, without killing their crops. Monsanto will offer a new dicamba- and glyphosate-tolerant soybean. Bayer has added glyphosate and isoxaflutole tolerance to its soybeans. Dow's new soybean can also party, ménage à trois-style, with 2,4-D, glyphosate and glufosinate. DuPont has filed patents for crops holding seven herbicide-resistant traits. And a score of new, single-tolerance crops resistant to herbicides other than Roundup also await the USDA green light.

These new seeds mean big bucks for agrichemical companies. Patented, stacked resistant seeds will cost farmers more than plain old Roundup-ready ones. Buoyed by the prospect, Monsanto's stock price hit a two-year high in early October.

----

Yet scientists warn that there are significant ecological consequences to stacked resistance. "It isn't a very sustainable system, and it keeps breaking down," says Bruce Maxwell, a plant ecologist at Montana State University in Bozeman. Today's weeds are resistant to Roundup, and the weeds of the future will be resistant to multiple herbicides, says Maxwell, just as some bacteria are now resistant to multiple antibiotics. In fact, it's happening already, as scientists discover more weeds resistant to Roundup and other herbicides.

The USDA, though, says the risk doesn't warrant disapproval of the new seeds. The agency's main criteria for approval of a new seed technology is whether it poses a risk to other plants. Companies submit field trial data to the USDA to prove their new seeds do not. If that burden of proof is met, after two rounds of public comment, the seeds get approved. The Environmental Protection Agency has a voice in the process only if the new seeds will change how a pesticide is used. Since some stacked-resistant seeds do involve new uses, the EPA will evaluate how they could affect the environment and human health. To date, though, it has consistently approved herbicide-resistant seeds.

The Agriculture Department realizes that using seeds resistant to multiple herbicides will encourage weeds resistant to multiple herbicides. So the agency encourages alternative tactics, like educating farmers to use crop rotations, weed-munching insects, cover crops, tilling and other tools, a process known as "integrated weed management."

Most weed scientists are already doing this, though, to little avail. Idaho's Morishita has long encouraged sugar beet farmers in his region to rotate beets with wheat, till periodically, and spray herbicides other than Roundup, so weeds are less likely to become resistant. He'd like to see glyphosate, which is relatively benign as herbicides go, remain a useful chemical. "Roundup-ready is really a wonderful technology. But it works so well, it's easy to just stick with it."

Critics say USDA's reliance on education as a strategy to prevent resistance is about as helpful as the agency crossing its fingers or knocking on wood. "Of course, the companies are happy to keep this going," says Bill Freese, of the Center for Food Safety. "They always want a new product to sell."

MSU's Maxwell also worries that increased use of chemicals more potent and dangerous than Roundup will harm the environment, with effects like the release of cancer-causing chemicals and more deformities and deaths among amphibians.

Many farmers, however, claim that crop rotations and other techniques are inefficient. Iowa farmer Dave Miller says it comes down to economics. "(We are told) we need to do some different rotations. Occasionally I hear references (that hearken to the past), 'Grandpa did a five-crop rotation.' Well, Grandpa probably had 30 milk cows and 10 sows. That's not today's production agriculture at all. That's like saying, if you've got a computer virus, why don't we all go back to typewriters?"

Herbicide-resistant seeds may not save farmers as much as they hope, though. In an eight-year trial, the USDA found that farms practicing the kind of rotations recommended by weed scientists were just as profitable or even more so than their corn-soy-focused neighbors -- while causing less pollution.

Seed and herbicide companies remain confident that resistant weeds will always be beatable, that a new chemical solution can always be found. Although agrichemical companies now admit that there's a problem, as recently as 2004, a Monsanto advertorial informed farmers that the true solution to resistant weeds was applying Roundup at a full dose. "The goal is to kill all the weeds, because we know that dead weeds will not become resistant," the ad copy read.

We all know how that turned out.

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2012/11/26 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCoping with two-headed fish and other effects of seleniumhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.9/coping-with-two-headed-fish-and-other-effects-of-selenium
Researchers try to determine if unhealthy amounts of selenium are entering Western soil and water due to energy development.Muddy Creek is nondescript, a narrow stream trickling through the sagebrush steppe of southern Wyoming. But like many Western waterways, it carries selenium, a natural poison that seeps from rocks and dirt and accumulates in the food chain much as mercury does.

Both humans and animals need tiny amounts for good health, but too much is dangerous. In areas with a lot of selenium in the soil, including Utah's Middle Green River Basin and Nevada's Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, activities that bring soil into contact with water -- irrigating, mining, drilling and road building -- boost natural concentrations, and can cause illness and deformities in people, livestock and wildlife.

Now, researchers are studying the Muddy Creek watershed, trying to determine how much of the element occurs naturally, and how much is being released by human activity. Tracking selenium sources in this way is tricky, but essential; few studies have examined where selenium comes from and where it ends up.

JoAnn Holloway, a physical scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and her team of researchers have tested for selenium in water, soil, rocks and invertebrates in this part of the Colorado River's upper tributaries for several years. The team has set baseline data for the region, measuring background levels and investigating whether recent local natural gas development is increasing amounts, as erosion from newly scraped roads and well pads washes selenium into streams. By studying the watershed now, prior to extensive development, Holloway's team may help land managers ward off potential problems. "Selenium is going to become an issue (as energy development continues)," says Holloway. "Our study was a way of saying, ‘We need to keep our heads up about this.' "

The USGS, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all watch for selenium pollution in various ways, but no agency has clear responsibility for comprehensive West-wide monitoring. The Environmental Protection Agency has regulated levels in drinking water since the 1970s, but has yet to develop rules limiting significant sources, such as coal ash produced by coal-fired power plants.

For years, selenium was often overlooked as an environmental problem. Then, in the early 1970s at Kesterson Reservoir in California's San Joaquin Valley, a Bureau of Reclamation project began dumping irrigation water, carrying selenium leached from farm fields into wetlands. By the early 1980s, fish, birds and reptiles were failing to hatch or had serious deformities –– missing eyes, misshapen beaks, protruding brains. "That's a sort of worst-case scenario of how nasty selenium can get," Holloway says. Irrigation is still a major source of selenium pollution in Western waterways.

It made hair-raising headlines again this February. Photographs of deformed trout, some two-headed, surfaced from a study commissioned by the J.R. Simplot Company, which wants to release selenium at levels above national and state standards at its southeastern Idaho phosphate mine. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that Simplot's report systematically underestimated the impact on wildlife. (The company's request is still pending.)

The reproductive abilities of native fish such as razorback suckers and Colorado pikeminnow are already limited by selenium in the Colorado River watershed. After hatching, the poorly developed offspring are likely to sicken or be eaten. "These are fish that evolved to live in these waters," says Ken Leib, a hydrologist for the USGS. "Current selenium levels are probably higher than they were historically."

But quantifying selenium increase at a single location isn't easy. Selenium levels vary seasonally and annually, depending on water flows, and data on historical background amounts are thin to nonexistent. Distinguishing natural levels from development-caused ones is, says Holloway, "kind of a dicey operation." It's easier to study contaminants that don't occur naturally, such as pesticides or dyes.

At Muddy Creek, Holloway's team found no clear uptick in selenium concentrations in developed versus undeveloped areas. That may be due to the relatively short monitoring period. However, the team did find that the creek's aquatic and riparian invertebrates -- damselfly larvae and long-jawed spiders -- are accumulating more selenium than is considered safe for the birds and fish that feed on them. This link, demonstrating how water quality affects selenium levels in the food web, is the study's key finding, says Patrick Lionberger, a fisheries biologist at the Rawlins BLM field office.

While it's too early to say how the study might affect energy development permitting, Lionberger says it does give the BLM more to consider in the approval process. If a strong link between selenium concentrations and energy development is established, state and federal regulatory agencies might decide to change land management practices. The BLM won't comment on possible changes, but Holloway's study implies that they might potentially include some limits on road and well-pad building; the state could potentially restrict surface discharge of the water produced by drilling.

For now, reluctantly, Holloway's USGS team has had to quit gathering data -- they ran out of funding. But even as research proceeds in fits and starts, the West's selenium issues are likely to become more severe. "The big issue here in Muddy Creek and in the West in general," says Travis Schmidt, an invertebrate ecologist on Holloway's team, "will be, I think, the cumulative effect. We're changing the way we use land, and there is no big effort to monitor the effects of selenium on downstream resources. Over the total landscape that could be a huge problem for wildlife."

]]>No publisherClimate Change2012/05/30 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe time for oystershttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/the-time-for-oysters-1
Increasing ocean acidity spells trouble for shellfishNext time you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area, which for your own sake will be soon, I hope, there are a few things you ought to do. Walk across the Golden Gate, go one of the Thursday “NightLife” events at the Academy of Sciences and drive north to Tomales Bay and feast on fresh oysters from one of the local hatcheries.

T

he bridge may be a touristy stop, but it’s a beautiful one that no one regrets. The museum after dark is hottest ticket in town -- all the cool kids will be there, loving on science and displaying fashionable shoes. And the oyster feast is something to enjoy sooner rather than later, for oysters, and shellfish at large, may be on their way out.

The ocean’s acidity is increasing, fast enough to affect shellfish, so fast they may not be able to adapt and keep up.

Since the late 1950s geochemists have been concerned about climate-caused ocean acidity. However, a study published this April purports to be the first conclusive link that massive die offs in Pacific Northwest Oyster hatcheries have been due, at least in part, to climate-caused changes in ocean chemistry.

In contrast with many environmental problems, the chemistry of ocean acidification is simple and essentially without controversy. As nicely explained by Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the chemistry of the ocean is driven by the chemistry of the atmosphere; more carbon dioxide in the air leads to more carbon dioxide dissolved in the water; these changes spell trouble for animals with shells made of calcium. The dissolved CO2 becomes carbonic acid -- a corrosive (just pop some chalk in a glassful of soda and see what happens). And there is something else at play.

“The early growth stage for oysters is particularly sensitive to the carbonate chemistry of the water,” said George Waldbusser in a release from Oregon State University. Waldbusser is a benthic ecologist in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “As the water becomes more acidified, it affects the formation of calcium carbonate, the mineral of which the shell material consists. As the CO2 goes up, the mineral stability goes down, ultimately leading to reduced growth or mortality.”

The larval oysters were at times so impaired, so slow to grow at the study site, a commercial hatchery in Oregon’s Netarts Bay, rearing them commercially would not be cost-effective. Noticing die-offs several years ago, the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery suspected low oxygen or bacterial infections. Instead, by rearing oysters in different samples of ocean water, they saw oysters fail in low-pH water that had been taken during seasonal upwellings, when cold, deep, CO2-rich waters flooded the bay.

While this pushed the larval oysters over the edge, this is a bigger, longer-term problem for shellfish around the globe. The oceans absorb about a third of the carbon that humans put into the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, they’ve become roughly 30 percent more acidic.

The Whiskey Creek hatchery, fortunately, is not out of business. Hatchery operators have been able to adjust, taking in water during times of the day when quality is at its highest.

While the news is good in the short-term, the longer view is a sobering one. Previous research by one of the study’s authors found that the water upwelled off the Oregon coast was last in contact with the surface 50 years ago, when atmospheric carbon was much lower. “Since atmospheric CO2 levels have risen significantly in the past half-century, it means that the water that will be upwelled in the future will become increasingly be more corrosive,” said Burke Hales, in the OSU release.

The oysters of Tomales are currently holding steady. A distributed partnership known as C-CAN operates a monitoring program, and hasn’t noticed any dramatic die-offs yet.

When I’m in my 80s, however, any oyster larvae left along the coast will be contending with the carbon dioxide dissolving in the ocean today. That’s true even if we are then spewing less carbon into the atmosphere. So I’ve pretty much given up hope of taking my grandkids to Tomales Bay oyster feasts.

Let’s just hope, at that point, I can still walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. And, if I’m very lucky, maybe those grandkids will take me to NightLife at the CalAcademy. We can visit the oysters preserved in alcohol, I’ll tell them how they used to taste: tangy, full of minerals, best eaten raw on the half shell with a squeeze of lemon, chased down with a lager.

Danielle Venton is a former High Country News intern and reporter for KRCB 91-FM in Sonoma County, California.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeBlog Post2012/05/16 09:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSalmon songhttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/salmon-song
A last ditch effort to save Central California Coho begins to make headwayFrom the outside, the sprawling new red shed at the base of Warm Springs Dam, in Sonoma, Calif., looks suited to cows, pigs and other farm animals. But a peek inside reveals several dozen above-ground tanks, resembling water troughs, and pools, resembling Doughboy Pools. In total, the tanks and pools hold roughly 200,000 young coho salmon, ranging in size from smaller than a pinky finger, to the length of a forearm.

This new building officially opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony yesterday, and will house the 10-year-old Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program, which aims to bring Central Coast coho back from the brink of extinction.

“We started this program just in the nick of time,” said Ben White, a biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who oversees daily operations at the hatchery. Prior to the new building, the pools for raising the fish were housed under nets to fend off birds and raccoons. The new building offers the fish better protection, and the salmon's caretakers shelter from the elements. “Both humans and fish,” White says, “will be happier and safer.”

It is loss of habitat, however, and not roving raccoons, that primarily threatens these fish. Without this program, coho in the Russian River would likely be extinct. Today, White and others are hopeful that a sustainable, wild breeding population can re-establish.

The coho of California’s Central Coast are traditionally a reproductively isolated group, extending roughly from Humboldt County in the north to Santa Cruz in the south. The group is distinct enough, biologists believe, to warrant classification as an evolutionarily significant unit, allowing them to be listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Historically, the Russian River, which flows southward through Mendocino and Sonoma Counties, was the most

significant breeding and feeding ground for these fish. As river conditions changed, due to development, agriculture and dams, including temporary seasonal (or "summer") dams, water levels dropped, average temperatures rose and the river muddied.

Biologists noticed a precipitous decline among coho in the late 1990s. Numbers dwindled so drastically that in 2001 biologists from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other state and federal agenciesstaged a rescue operation -- capturing what wild fish they could find to begin a captive breeding program.

The Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program has released hatchery-raised coho since 2004. But, until this year, return rates have been poor. The fish are marked with small tags, roughly the size of a grain of rice, inserted into their abdomen, that trigger sensors when they return at the end of their life cycle. The winter of 2009 - 10 was the first year that more than 20 fish were observed returning to the Russian River. This winter, nearly 200 were seen, of the nearly 170,00 released. (Researchers estimate three to four times that number actually came back.)While scientists would like to see far more than that -- around 3,000 would be great, they say -- it’s a good start.

Hatchery programs are frequently criticized by environmental groups for artificially boosting fish numbers and masking the real cause of fish decline -- loss of habitat. The truth is, no matter how well housed the breeding program, there is no substitution for good rivers.

“We think we can replace the wild salmon and the wild salmon habitat, but that simply isn’t true,” said Bill Bakke, of the Native Fish Society. “It’s not going to fix the real problem.”

Given the dire circumstances, however, a breeding program for the wild population is the best option. “It’s a desperate measure," says Bakke, “a sign you’re at the end of your string.”

The fact is there would be no coho left in the river without this program, says DuBay. But she admits, “The long-term survival of the fish will come only from improving the health of the river.” Later this summer, the agency will begin a project to restore 6 miles of habitat along the river. A drop in the proverbial bucket, but a start.

“These fish indicate the health of the whole ecosystem,” DuBay says. “Helping them helps other fish, and other plants and animals. Plus, you want your children and grandchildren to see these fish. They’re worth saving.”

Danielle Venton is a former High Country News intern and reporter for KRCB in Sonoma County, California.

Image(s): 1) Coho salmon/Alaska Department of Fish and Game; 2) Rep. Mike Thompson at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new building housing the Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program/Danielle Venton; 3) A biologists removes covers from a juvenile coho tank at the Broodstock Program/Danielle Venton.

]]>No publisherWildlifeBlog Post2012/05/03 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleArizona's clean-election law is pruned, but not uprootedhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.7/arizonas-clean-election-law-is-pruned-but-not-uprooted
Clean-elections laws have a way of withering away, especially since the Supreme Court's controversial Citizens United ruling, but Arizona is still struggling to keep political campaigns fair.In the late 1980s and early '90s, a string of political scandals left Arizona voters incensed. Ultra-conservative Gov. Evan Mecham was impeached in 1988 for misusing campaign contributions. The next year, both Arizona U.S. senators, Dennis DeConcini, D, and John McCain, R, were accused of corruption for meddling in an investigation of Lincoln Savings and Loan, a bank chaired by major campaign donor Charles Keating. The bank's collapse in '89 cost the federal government $3 billion. The Senate Ethics Committee found that DeConcini acted improperly and McCain showed "poor judgment."

In 1998, a still-angry electorate passed the Clean Elections Act, a ballot measure designed to level the playing field for candidates of relatively modest means running against those bankrolled by powerful donors or their own personal fortunes. Qualifying candidates finance their campaigns with public funding, freeing them of the need to court big contributors.

"Voters wanted to get special interests out of politics," says Ruth Jones, an Arizona State University political science professor.

It was a pioneering effort to temper the power of money in elections, preceding even the 2002 federal campaign finance reform fashioned by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Candidates opting to use public financing promise to limit personal spending to $500, participate in at least one public debate and return unspent money to the state. To qualify for the funds -- raised by a surcharge on civil and criminal fines -- and prove they are viable and well-organized, candidates collect $5 contributions from voters in their district. Those running for the state Legislature need at least 220 contributions. Though participants agree to overall spending limits, if a privately backed opponent spends over a set threshold, the publicly funded contender gets dollar-for- dollar matching funds up to a point.

At least, that's how it used to work. In Arizona and around the nation, campaign finance laws have a curious way of wilting or being uprooted over time. Laws passed in Portland, Ore., and Massachusetts, for instance, were eventually repealed. And now, clean-elections laws at both the federal and state level face an increasingly hostile U.S. Supreme Court, which has asserted that money in politics is equivalent to free speech.

In 2006, the Supreme Court, under conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, deemed Vermont's clean-elections law, which boasted the lowest campaign-contribution limits in the country, unconstitutional. In 2008, it struck down the so-called "millionaire's amendment" in McCain-Feingold, which kept wealthy candidates from drowning out competing voices by allowing their opponents to accept higher contributions from individual donors. Two years later, the High Court ruled in the highly publicized Citizens United case that, so long as they don't directly coordinate with a particular campaign, anonymous donors can spend as much as they like on politicking, through "SuperPACs" or political action committees -- a total reversal of McCain-Feingold. And last summer, split 5-4 along partisan lines, the Court decided that Arizona's use of public funds to match high spending by privately financed campaigns was unconstitutional.

Those matching funds were instrumental in keeping races between publicly and privately funded candidates competitive by allowing the former to respond quickly to expensive last-minute attacks, even if they'd exhausted their initial public grant. Two-thirds of those running for office in Arizona used public funding during the 2006 and 2008 elections. In 2010, with matching funds on hold pending litigation, half of the candidates participated. This year, it's expected to be lower still.

"Our thinking is that with the elimination of matching funds, the (public financing) system will wither away," says Marcus Osborn, a lobbyist for the Goldwater Institute and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, two of the groups that sued over the Arizona law. That's fine with Osborn, who says it was too easy for radical candidates to qualify for public financing, causing "election distortion."

Some others agree that Arizona's clean-elections laws helped bring a more diverse -- and sometimes more radical -- Legislature into power by encouraging candidates who would have been unable to run otherwise. But it also forced candidates to interact more with their constituents to get those $5 contributions. "You get to see people up close, people get to see you up close, you get to know their concerns and issues up close," says former Tucson Mayor Thomas Volgy, a University of Arizona political science professor. "That (relationship) is not something that gets created in a TV studio."

Clean-elections fans should, perhaps, be grateful Arizona's program still exists at all. In early April, a repeal looked set to go to voters in November. The bill, introduced by Sen. John McComish, R-Phoenix, was marketed as "no taxpayer money for politicians." (Actually, the program makes money and returns its surplus to the state -- a total of $64 million so far.) Clean Elections Commission Executive Director Todd Lang says he's confident the public would have voted to keep the program. But, after negotiating, the two groups announced a compromise: One source of income, an option for taxpayers to divert $5 toward the program, will be removed and the program's educational activities will be limited. A full repeal won't appear on the ballot.

The commission has been simultaneously stoic and sanguine. "The program would work more efficiently if we still had matching funds," says Lang, who thinks it can fashion a new system providing some public matching funds that will hold up in court.

No one knows what the full effect of losing the millionaire's amendment, matching-funds provisions and donation limits to SuperPACs will be, at either the state or federal level. "We may have to wade through an election cycle or two and see what happens," says Jones, a former clean elections commissioner. "If, as the opponents of Citizens United suggest, it gets really wild, then the people might come back with some reform movement." Winds that blow from one direction can, in time, blow from another.

]]>No publisherPolitics2012/04/30 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDownsized cleanup plan for Idaho Superfund sitehttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/downsized-cleanup-plan-for-idaho-superfund-site
A new effort aims to help the people of the Coeur d'Alene basin and the Environmental Protection Agency get alongThe mines of Silver Valley, Idaho, east of Coeur d'Alene Lake were once the richest silver producers in the world. The valley's flush days, however, are long gone. In 1981, thousands of miners lost their jobs when the sinking price of silver forced the mines to close (a few have since reopened). Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the area poisoned -- a federal Superfund site -- and the valley was stamped with an ugly stigma its residents have resented ever since.

For locals, the EPA's declaration that their valley and lake were among the
most polluted areas in the world felt like a hard poke in a sore bruise. Since the closure of the mines, residents have been focused on reviving the region's economy, with tourism as a mainstay. Needless to say, being known for having a wealth of sullied ground isn't good for marketing.

But no matter how unkind it has felt to be labeled one of the most polluted
places in the world, the moniker was, and unfortunately remains, true.
Mines from the upper basin have washed 100 million tons of waste into the Coeur d’Alene river, the EPA
estimates. Locals in the valley have some of the highest recorded
blood-levels of lead measured in humans. Children are especially
susceptible to the high lead levels. Fish are unable to survive and
reproduce in about 20 miles of streams in the basin. There is virtually
no aquatic life in about 10 of those miles. Some hillsides are tainted
with lead and so acidic that planted trees die or remain stunted
saplings.

As the EPA finished up work on the initially designated Bunker Hill
Box site, it cast its eyes west, over the entire 1,500-square mile
basin. When the agency expanded the Superfund site in 1998, outcry was loud and cranky. And so it remains.

This February, the EPA released a new version of its cleanup plan for Silver Valley. Responding to nearly 7,000 comments from a public eager to get on with their lives, the agency is proposing spending $740 million over 20 to 30 years. Its original, more comprehensive plan called for $1.3 billion over more than 50 years and would have cleaned 342 mine sites, a good deal more than the 197 now proposed. The Idaho Legislature, which does not have a reputation for cooperating with the EPA, responded by debating a resolution to request the agency finish the cleanup within five years. The resolution, later tabled, accused the EPA of crippling the region's development through its Superfund designation, "based upon highly questionable scientific data."

The cleanup, under the revised plan, is set to begin this summer. The total project will require a huge number of workers – some of whom will likely receive training under a new program designed to help the people of the Coeur d'Alene Basin and the EPA get along. Though
funded by the EPA, the Technical Assistance Services for Communities
program , or TASC, acts independently to help locals understand and get
involved in the cleanup. TASC held its first meetings in Silver Valley this week, introducing its educational and job-training services to the public. This step comes as the EPA seeks to respond to requests from residents who want more information about the agency's activities, without interacting directly with the EPA.

While Silver Valley residents may complain about the Superfund stigma, the EPA's efforts bring a huge flow of cash and jobs into the region. The EPA has spent hundreds of thousands on street maintenance and nearly $20 million in flood control and city projects. But, even in communities where the EPA's cleanup programs are initially welcomed, projects have a way of becoming unpopular as they expand or drag on. And some now wonder if, after all of these years, the real needs of the community and environment will ever be met.

"It is unfortunate that the EPA caved in to pressure from Idaho and sliced the cleanup nearly in half," Mike Petersen of The Lands Council told the Associated Press. "The legacy of heavy metals contamination will continue, however, and Lake Coeur d'Alene and the Spokane River will have poorer water quality than under the original plan."

Danielle Venton is an intern at High Country News. Image of Lake Coeur d'Alene courtesy of Jami Dwyer/Flickr.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBlog Post2012/04/19 11:10:00 GMT-6ArticleHunters ask for protection from enviroshttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/hunters-ask-for-protection-from-enviros
The Sportsmen's Heritage Act would significantly expand hunting's legal reach.This week, the U.S. House of Representatives plans to consider the "Sportsmen's Heritage Act of 2012," a package of bills intended to benefit hunters and anglers. The bill seeks to open additional federal land for hunting, allows polar bear trophies to be imported from Canada, and removes the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate lead in ammunition.

The Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, a pro-hunting lobby, asked foundation supporters, "Help us overcome the obstacles facing sportsmen and women and further the sporting tradition so that it can be handed down for generations to come." The CSF is characterizing the omnibus bill as "essential to recognizing the importance of, and facilitating the expansion and enhancement of, hunting and recreational fishing and shooting."

A skeptical glance, however, reveals that America's sportsmen and women are not nearly as persecuted as some – particularly the more entitled and paranoid among them – would love to think they are. For one, there is the worry that nefarious enviros seek to increase the price of ammunition to the point that Second Amendment rights are imperiled. "Just as environmentalists seek to drive down the use of fossil fuels by making them too expensive, a similar strategy could render guns unaffordable," said The Washington Times, referring to efforts to get hunters to switch to non-lead-based ammunition.

(Granted, non-lead ammunition is generally more expensive. Hunters who always opt for the least expensive ammunition will especially notice a difference. Those, however, who routinely opt for high-end ammo find the difference negligible.)

The EPA has rejected petitions to ban lead ammunitions before. However the "Heritage Act" would permanently take away their ability to lead ammo by removing hunting and fishing equipment from the agency's purview for this and all future administrations.

Lawrence G. Keane, the National Shooting Sports Foundation senior vice president put out an impassioned statement to supporters. "Hunters and their ammunition have done more for wildlife than the CBD ever will," said Keane, referring to an 11 percent federal excise tax paid by ammunition manufacturers to fund the Wildlife Restoration Trust Fund, run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "These relentless and unfounded attacks against traditional ammunition by agenda-driven groups like the CBD," Keane said, "are exactly why Congress must take immediate action and pass the Sportsmen's Heritage Act of 2012."

If the Act passes, hunters will be able to shoot those newly-protected lead bullets over a far wider range of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. The act directs an "open unless closed" policy for recreational shooting on USFS and BLM lands, removing restrictions from many areas. And, in a reversal of the BLM's former policy, target practice would now be allowed on BLM National Monument lands.

The final tweak would legalize imports of trophy polar bears from Canada shot prior to the species' listing as an endangered species in 2008 (currently, importation is forbidden under the Marine Mammal Protection Act). The "Polar Bear Conservation and Fairness Act" would allow U.S. hunters to bring home 41 trophy bears – still in Canada – that were shot while the Endangered Species Act listing was pending.

"These individuals knowingly assumed the risk that their trophies might not be approved for importation," wrote Elisabeth Torres in Global Animal, an animal-focused news organization. "Allowing them to import those trophies now would constitute an unfair bailout."

"Fairness" in the House today is a relative term. With the GOP leadership consistently pushing for goodies for their constituents, what is considered fair for one, is not considered fair by all.

Danielle Venton is an intern at High Country News.

Photo of hunter and daughter waiting for a deer before sunset, near San Antonio, Texas, 1973; courtesy of EPA/Documerica/Flickr.

]]>No publisherRecreationBlog Post2012/04/17 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleFriday news roundup: Water's the word in Western newshttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/friday-news-roundup-water-on-the-mind
Good salmon season expected, California's water-related climate readiness questionedWhile the perennial news of the West remains it’s drying, it’s drying, it’s drying, this week brought us a welcome respite: thunder and rain storms. The air smelled fresh, the fields greened and the cars went another week without washing. Water related news also poured down through the intertubes too: read on.

Salmon chroniclesAbout half of the Pacific’s salmon, trout and char populations are likely threatened by three agricultural herbicides registered by the Environmental Protection Agency. From the annals of unpopular reports, the National Marine Fisheries Service recently released a draft biological opinion [PDF] concluding that products containing oryzalin, pendimethalin, and tricluralin will hurt fish species if they enter waterways. The evaluation is part of a settlement from an earlier lawsuit, Washington Toxics Coalition v. EPA. NMFS is proposing buffer zones between fields where the pesticides will be aerially applied and creeks and rivers that connect to salmonid-bearing waters. Under the settlement, the Service is also evaluating more than 30 other pesticides that “may affect” salmonid species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The EPA is collecting comments regarding the measures proposed by the Service until April 30.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad news in the salmon kingdom. Managers are forecasting the best season in the Pacific Northwest in several years. Early this month the Pacific Fisheries Management Council decided to allow sport and commercial fishing off the mouth of the Columbia river from June through September, a longer than usual season. Fishermen off the coasts of Northern California and Southern Oregon should have a robust season as well. Fish returns in the Sacramento and Klamath rivers were four times greater this year than last.

Some of those fish in the Klamath and Trinity Rivers had been under consideration for protection under the Endangered Species Act. However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service recently decided that area's chinook salmon won’t get listed. While the numbers returning to the rivers each year in the spring are low -- less than 3,000 each year -- federal biologists found that spring chinook are part of the same genetic group as those returning in the fall, a population expected to return in record numbers this year.

EnergyLawmakers in Nebraska approved a bill on Wednesday to speed the review of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline. The law undermines tougher regulations the same legislature passed in November, and gives the pipeline company, TransCanada, greater power in choosing the pipeline route. The review process for the pipeline was halted in January, when President Obama denied granting a federal permit for the project. Obama has since announced plans to expedite a permit for the pipeline’s southern half. When completed, the 36-inch pipeline would carry crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries on Gulf Coast of Texas, stretching through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Climate & water

Ah, the classic Western obsession. It’s no surprise that a water-focused report released last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council garnered some real attention. The report, which ranks states in terms of their climate-related water readiness, has led some water wonks to question its premises. California got top marks for developing a comprehensive strategy for anticipating droughts and reduced snow pack, prompting a nice Golden State pat on the back in The San Francisco Chronicle. However, California water writer Emily Green was highly critical of the report’s evaluation methods. “If a state that turned Owens Lake into a salt bed, that led the West in destroying the Colorado River estuary and is well on its way to finishing off the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta gets a top ranking for water management in the face of climate change, it must be asked: What merits a fail?” Green asks. Read her evaluation at the Chance of Rain blog.

WildlifeIn forests across North America, declining numbers of large predators, wolves in particular, have buoyed moose, deer and other plant-munching animals. The rise of the herbivores has, in turn, made it difficult for new trees and young plants, leading to a loss of biodiversity. The study, published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research surveyed more than 40 studies holding data gathered over 50 years. The evidence is consistent, says lead author William Ripple, that large predators are good for ecosystems.

WildfireA severe wildfire in 2009 left the Angeles National Forest a charred ruin. A year ago the U.S. Forest Service began planted nearly a million pine and fir trees, hoping to reforest the area. But the land, they are finding, is too scorched, causing the Forest Service to revise their strategies.

Danielle Venton is an intern at High Country News. Photos: 1)Removing salmon eggs for hatchery rearing at the Kalama River Hatchery, Oregon, 1936. Courtesy of OSU Commons/Flickr; 2) The Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon circa 1972, Courtesy of New York Public Library/Flickr.

]]>No publisherWaterBlog Post2012/04/13 09:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBiofuel crops invade gas tanks, habitathttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/weeds-invade-croplands-habitat-and-gas-pumps
Proposed legislation could promote the planting of aggressive, invasive plants for bioenergyFrom bindweed to tamarisk, invasive weeds are a scourge of many Western
communities; certainly not something anyone wants more of. Yet a clause in newly proposed bill to promote biofuels
energy may open up a loophole that would send federal dollars to pay farmers for planting and growing certain
highly invasive plants as bioenergy feedstocks.

It turns out that many of the plants being grown or evaluated for biofuels are nasty, aggressive invasive things, at least for fans of native habitat. Weedy, speedy growing plants are, practically by definition, great potential bioenergy feedstocks. And they're not all bad: Plant-based combustibles don't require drilling, don't spill catastrophically into the Gulf of Mexico, don't contribute to international conflicts and – so long as we can grow and harvest plants – won't dry up. For those reasons, hope and federal money is being poured, by the truckload, into biofuels.

Yesterday, the National Wildlife Federation released a report warning that many crops grown or being considered for biofuels come with a high risk of escaping crop fields, invading and damaging habitat. Currently, the Farm Bill-funded Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP) provides money for farmers seeking to establish biofuel crops. Under current law, invasive or potentially invasive crops are excluded from this program. But according to Aviva Glaser, the legislative representative for agriculture policy at National Wildlife Federation, a bill introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), would remove that clause, promoting the cultivation, and potential escapes, of invasive and genetically modified bioenergy feedstocks.

"The optimal crops are fast growing and resistant to pests," said Glaser during a teleconference on the report. "Should invasive bioenergy feedstocks escape and establish in native habitats, it could devastate ecosystems."

The report, Growing Risk: Addressing the Invasive Potential of Bioenergy Feedstocks [pdf], examines six potential invader crops. Giant reed (Arundo donax), for example, is perennial grass native to India. It's large and fast growing: reaching heights between nine and 30 feet and can spread through rhizomes underground or through stem fragments. Fragments can even float downstream during storms and grow where they come to rest. Within two years of a first planning, an estimated 20 tons of biomass could come from a single acre of Arundo. While it may have grand energy potential, it is already listed by the World Conservation Union as one of the world's worst weeds and is listed as noxious in Texas, California, Colorado and Nevada.

In Oregon, the Boardman Power Plant is growing about 100 acres of giant reed as part of a pilot project. The town of Boardman is located on the Columbia River, which could provide a pathway for the grass to invade far and wide. Cost estimates for eradicating giant reed from a single acre range as high as $25,000.

While the NWF remains in favor of bioenergy, they warn of missing the opportunity to prevent widespread ecological damage.

"We truly have the chance to get ahead of the risk," said Patty Glick, National Wildlife Federation senior climate change specialist. "We need to focus on prevention. Most of state and federal efforts to control invasive species have been largely piecemeal and reactionary."

The report recommends "vigorous screening" of candidate crops to evaluate their invasive potential and suggests that feedstock producers themselves bear the cost of monitoring and controlling escapees. This, Glick suggests, will encourage companies to use plants that are unlikely to cause habitat damage.

Some farmers, at least, see just as much potential for bioenergy in low-risk native plants.

"You can make money and a help native wildlife by growing native plants for bioenergy," said Steve Flick, chairman of the board for the Show Me Energy Cooperative in a NWF press release. "Missouri farmers are doing this right now as part of the Show Me Energy Cooperative, and it’s a model that can work throughout the country."

]]>No publisherWildlifeBlog Post2012/04/05 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMargaret Hiza Redsteer uses Navajo memories to track climate changehttps://www.hcn.org/articles/geologist-margaret-hiza-redsteer-tracks-climate-change-through-navajo-memories
A scientist taps the recollections of tribal elders as part of her work to piece together the story of landscape change on the Navajo Nation.Margaret Hiza Redsteer has long known the Navajo Nation. Of Crow descent, she grew up near the Montana-Wyoming border, and in the 1970s moved to an area of Arizona then shared by the Navajo and Hopi tribes. She married a Navajo man and they had three children. While living on the reservation, she often heard people talk about how much the land's vegetation had changed. "But at that point," she says, "it hadn’t really clicked what that meant – that it indicated climate change."

In 1986 the 29-year-old Hiza Redsteer and her family resettled in Flagstaff, where she began to study geology at the university. After 14 years of schooling, she returned to the Navajo Nation with a Ph.D., as an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey in the early 2000s. Her research specialty was studying volcanic deposits near Yellowstone. But, as she grew convinced of the harmful effects of climate change on reservation livelihoods, she decided to switch focus. Her pioneering work using aerial photographs, GPS maps and remote laser sensing data to track landscape level changes on the Navajo Nation was written about in "Shifting sands in Navajoland," (HCN story; 6/23/08).

Now, Hiza Redsteer is pushing to find out even more about ecological changes her original data could not track by incorporating a rarely-used form of climate data into her research -- the accounts of Indian elders. She has extensively interviewed many elders, and now their perspective is illuminating new aspects of the region's environmental history.

High Country News If I was a Navajo child, what would I hear about the weather and climate growing up?

Margaret Hiza Redsteer The elders often talk about the difference in grass, how tall, how thick, how much of it there used to be. Some people say when they were young and herding sheep they had to stay right with the herd. If they didn’t the sheep would get lost in the grass. It's not like that now.

HCN What have you learned from these oral histories?

Hiza Redsteer The elders' memories can give us information that the physical records can’t. They give a much better picture of what the ecological changes have been. For example, people talk about how, in the winter, the snow was chest high on the horses. They talk about using particular streams for irrigation of crops, but many of those aren’t even flowing now,

It helps us fill in gaps too. There are huge time gaps in some of the earlier photography. We have a photo set from 1936, for instance, but then the next photo set we have from the area is from 1954. That’s a huge gap in time when you’re trying to unravel how the landscape changed and what caused it.

HCN Is there a difference between the kind of information you can get through oral and analytical methods?

MHR We can model evapotranspiration rates based on temperature; we can make observations of soil moisture. But one thing that we can't do very easily is project back to what those conditions were like when there was more snow. One of the things we’ve learned (from oral accounts) is that soil moisture conditions were much different. In the Southwest we expect precipitation during two distinct periods: winter rains, followed by a dry windy spring, then the summer monsoons. Springs have become much warmer; we can see that in the meteorological record.

We've learned from the elders that the soil stayed moist all through the spring until the summer monsoon arrived. Now, if you were to go out in the springtime during the dry windy season, you could dig a very big trench and not run into any wet sand or soil. The ecological effects are huge because shallow rooted plants aren't going to do as well.

It's also hard to reconstruct where plants and animals were in the past. The elders have told us that when there were cottonwoods in the Little Colorado river there were lots of beavers. They used to see cranes migrate through the area in the spring, stopping in the marshes around lakes that aren't there now.

----

HCN Since human memories are fallible, how do you know what to trust?

MHR It is striking how well the oral history accounts match with the meteorological data that we have. For instance, there was a record snowstorm in December 1966. And a lot of people remember that, but aren’t sure if it was in 1966 or 1967, but they knew it was that particular winter. That’s pretty close!

Also, we have safety in numbers -- we've done about a hundred interviews. We look for people that have lived their entire lives on the reservation, living a traditional lifestyle. And we seek out people who are more knowledgeable about plants. The medicine men in particular, because they keep track of what plants and animals are around so they can use them in ceremonies.

Also, interviews from people in specific areas are very consistent. And we're seeing that people who live in the drier low-lands are seeing a different timing of changes than people who are living higher, among the buttes, ponderosa, pinyon and juniper trees. We're trying to understand that difference more clearly.

HCN How will this information help the Navajo?

MHR It takes the information that the elders have to offer and provides it to the community in a clear format, so they can discuss how they want to plan their land use. It really raises people's awareness.

HCN Are the Navajo going to be able to survive the next two centuries of climate change?

MHR That's the real concern. I think they -- along with a lot of native people and society in general -- are going to have to decide what is important to them and what their identity is. There are going to be cultural changes, there is no way for that not to occur. A lot of people have already moved away from having livestock. There is just no water for them; there is no feed. And to haul hay to the reservation all the time is really expensive. You're often making a poor living or losing money in the deal. People have some livestock now, just not very many, and mostly for ceremonial purposes.

HCN You've spoken with indigenous people all over the world about changes they've seen in their local environments.What are some of the similarities that you hear in those conversations?

MHR It's interesting because a lot of them say that they can't predict the weather anymore. Things have changed so much that their traditional calendars don't work. From people in the Amazon, in Africa, in Asia, that's a worldwide unified statement.

Often they blame themselves for the changes, because they're not following their traditions anymore. They blame themselves for becoming Westernized, driving cars, having wage jobs and not taking care of the land and having the same ceremonies like they used to. Most of the traditional religions have a tone of stewardship, a tone that Western society doesn't have. They think that because they're not taking care of the land that's why this is happening. In a way, you know, that's true (thinking abstractly) but it's really kind of tragic that they're blaming themselves for these changes.

HCN How do you react?

MHR I've discussed it with a lot of medicine men, that they're not to blame. Some are finally coming around, though it's taken a while. They still think, though, that they're partly responsible. It's a hard point to get across.

]]>No publisherClimate Change2012/04/04 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleFriday news roundup: Dwindling elk herds and the end of new coal plants?https://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/friday-news-roundup-dwindling-elk-herds-and-the-end-of-new-coal-plants
Aging aqueducts, nuclear power large and small, and the dangers of working in WyomingWith beautiful, unseasonably warm weather this week, the West's normally hungry news watchers had trouble keeping our eyes on the computer screens and away from the fruit trees blooming outside. Rallying our strengths, we found birds and elk did not fare well in Western news this week. Our cheer at the climate-conscious news coming from Environmental Protection Agency was tempered by disheartening reports on our immigration policies from Amnesty International. We will hope for continued fair weather and better news next week. Here is what caught our attention:

Late last January, a tube carrying hot, radioactive water sprang a leak in one of the reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The plant has since been closed. This week authorities announced the plant will likely remain shut throughout the summer, until serious problems with the equipment can be fixed. For Southern Californians, who suffered blackouts last year, this is bad news. State officials are working on plans for avoiding power outages in the coming months.

In other nuclear power news, the Department of Energy believes clusterable mini-reactors may be a future power solution. The Department recently announced $450 million dollars are available to support engineering and licensing.

On Animals A rough winter, hunters and attacks from wolves, bears and mountain lions have been harsh on a major elkherd that migrates annually through Yellowstone National Park. The herd, which 20 years ago was about 20,000 strong, is down to less than 4,200 animals today. In the last year the population has dropped 10 percent, authorities say.

In Washington State, thousands of swans have died after ingesting lead shot, prompting an outcry from environmentalists. A hundred organizations in 35 states are asking the EPA to usher in an era of non-toxic ammunition.

Also for the birds: The Department of the Interior recently released guidelines for helping wind energy developers to minimize the impact on wildlife, those with wings in particular. The guidelines are voluntary and address site selection, project design and operation. Wind energy is a key part of the Obama administration’s energy plans, said Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior. “We’re committed to working with developers to ensure that wind energy projects are build in the right places and operated in the right way.” On HumansA new report by Amnesty International, a global watchdog for human rights, details rights violations caused by immigration enforcement in the U.S. Southwest. Federal and state policies have pushed undocumented immigrants into using dangerous routes, increased racial profiling, barred access to education and essential health care (including for children who are U.S. citizens) and targeted immigrant and indigenous communities for discrimination. Wyoming is a risky place to work. Reports say it lacks a culture of safety and the leadership support to change it. The state routinely ranks among the highest in the nation for workforce fatality rates. This year, Wyoming families will lose an estimated 36 fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. The state legislature passed a bill this month that offers employers yet more grants and safety advice as a means of improving workers safety, but does little to monitor and enforce safety regulations, a move which has drawn criticism from longtime watchers of worker safety in the state.

On tap

Water, a perennial issue out West, travels through a complex infrastructure in sore need of upgrades. From the global water news site, Circle of Blue comes, a photographic slide show cataloging our aging aqueducts, water towers and sewer tunnels. For more on water, see our longstanding water coverage.

And with that, onward to the weekend...

Danielle Venton is an intern at High Country News.

Images: 1) San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, courtesy of Rian Castillo/Flickr. 2) Installing sewer pipes under the roads of Kearney, Nebraska in 1889. The town economically boomed in the late 1800s due to the railroad, then quickly went bust. Courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society/Circle of Blue.